Lecture notes to Applied Individual Differences 1: Clinical and Occupational Testing taught at the University of Westminster for the BSc Psychology degree programme.
Notes cover the following areas: The general principles, Predictive Validity, Psychometric testing in clinical assessment , Practic...
Most of the material in this module so far has largely been theoretical or methodical.
We talked a lot about the theoretical underpinnings of individual differences in
personality, intelligence and other constructs, and we looked a bit on measurement.
Today, I want to introduce the idea of why it is important, why we would want to
measure individual differences in applied context and how that happens in the real
world.
The focus of this lecture will be on psychological testing.
Background reading
Maltby et al offers limited coverage for today’s lecture – it will not cover all
material
Cooke and Butcher covers a lot more in detail for this lecture
The first part of this lecture will deal with clinical assessment and then the second
part will deal with testing in an occupational setting.
General principles
There are a number of different ways in which the test can be used in all of these
contexts.
Predictive validity
To find out if the scores on the test correlates with the real world
To check whether a test works
Whether it can give us information that is useful in the real world
Example: which people are likely to experience distress or psychological
problems so we can introduce interventions
Example: which people are likely to do well academically so that we can
select them for admission to a higher level program of study
To be able to select the appropriate people depending on the score
Example: imaginary intelligence test
, o Whether it is any good at measuring intelligence, we would look to see
whether the scores on the test correlated with their performance on
some kind of real world benchmark criteria that we thought would be
influenced by their level of mental ability.
o We would look for whether there is correlation in their IQ test score and
their academic performance or their overall earnings over their lifetime.
Test scores will be used as part of a larger process
There’s a distinction between psychological assessment and psychological
testing
Psychological assessment coming to a judgement about a person based
on information from a number of sources
Psychological testing getting them to fill in a psychometric test and then
scoring and interpreting it
Practical, professional and ethical issues associated with all applications
Assessment is a much more wider activity
Tests are strictly governed. The exception is the tests published in the public
domain for research – these are not subject to the same kind of regulation.
BPS sets out standards for tests used
Psychometric testing in clinical assessment
The key principle here is psychological abnormality
We are trying to evaluate whether a person has a problem; whether it is
sufficiently to be severe to be thought of as clinically significant.
Detection of abnormalities
Diagnosis identifying the type of problem/abnormality and the severity of it
Monitoring whether the status is changing all the time/whether the status is
changing as a result of therapy they are undergoing
Diagnostic systems
Both give diagnostic categories:
ICD-10
There is a new model ICD-11 which is going to be operational from Jan 2022
DSM-V controversial, but is a very influential and important set of
diagnostic criteria for categorising disorders of various sorts.
Test can be used as part of the evidence gathering process.
Practicalities
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